“Teach me to speak to you so that I may know you... your culture the bones of you. So that I may experience the uniqueness of your song, your spirit. Teach me to speak to you so that You can listen too... to me, who has a language all my own... who has a culture, a song... a spirit. Make us one in heart, but let us speak our language so that the ones who wish to listen, may learn too.”
by Red Flower, Cree Nation

Biocultural Diversity

Photo: Cristina Mittermeier

What do you think of if you hear about the “web of life”? More likely than not, you think of the nat­ural world: the mil­lions of species of plants and ani­mals that have evolved on Earth, inter­con­nected with one another and with the ecosys­tems in which they live.

But now think again. For mil­len­nia, peo­ple have been part of nature and have coe­volved with it. Over time, we have adapted to the nat­ural envi­ron­ment, while draw­ing mate­r­ial and spir­i­tual sus­te­nance from it. By inter­act­ing closely with one another and with nature, we have devel­oped thou­sands of dif­fer­ent cul­tures and languages—distinctive ways of see­ing, know­ing, doing, and speak­ing. For mil­len­nia, local cul­tures and lan­guages have been inti­mately, some say inex­tri­ca­bly, linked with the land­scapes in which peo­ple have lived gen­er­a­tion after generation.

This is the “true” web of life: the inter­linked diver­sity of nature and cul­ture. We call it “bio­cul­tural diversity”—the multi-faceted expres­sion of the beauty and poten­tial of life. Diver­sity in both nature and cul­ture con­fers vital­ity and resilience to this planet, our home, for present and future generations.

Bio­cul­tural diver­sity is a pre­cious gift to cher­ish and protect—yet, we are squan­der­ing this irre­place­able gift. Global eco­nomic, polit­i­cal, and social forces are rapidly erod­ing the health of the world’s ecosys­tems and cul­tures, and silenc­ing the voices of the world’s lan­guages. It is a “con­verg­ing extinc­tion cri­sis” of diver­sity in all its forms. The very fab­ric of life in nature and cul­ture is com­ing unrav­eled, leav­ing our bio­cul­tural world increas­ingly frag­ile and the out­look for humans and all other species increas­ingly uncer­tain. We are fool­ishly cut­ting the grass under our own feet.

Indige­nous peo­ples and local com­mu­ni­ties are affected most directly by the loss of bio­cul­tural diver­sity, but nobody is immune. The effort to restore and sus­tain the diver­sity of life in nature and cul­ture is a cause that we all share, no mat­ter who we are and where and how we live. Life is not expendable.

next: What are the links between bio­log­i­cal and cul­tural diversity? »

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